NAS "server + NAS offsite backup?

1 to 2TB cannot be copied into the cloud or to another site in 24 hours.

Time Machine backups have the advantage that they happen automatically within the last hour. But it can be inconvenient to remove the drives and start over every day.

Your proposed solution does not appear to address your top stated concern.

You need Additional backup sets (in addition, not a replacement, for Time Machine) whose drives can be physically carried offsite nightly. The traditional way of doing this is with a 3-or-more set rotation, where at least one set is always guaranteed to be off-site.

Example: set C takes today's backup and is carried off site at the end of the day. It is placed next to B on the shelf at home. set A comes to the Office the next day to accept the backup at the end of the day. These "snapshot" backups can be done easily with Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper!, Rdisc, and many others. Some of these can do incremental backups onto the same drives to save time if you prefer.

You may be able to do unattended backups, such as overnight, instead of end-of-day with someone sitting there. as long as one set stays off-site at all times.

Hi Rolf,

A lot of small companies are in a similar situation to what you've described -- needing to upgrade backup functionality without a big budget or IT guy to manage it.

Using a NAS as an expandable fileserver makes sense. However, syncing it to another NAS 5 times per 24 hours, where the home bandwidth may be much less than the 100Gbit you have at the office sounds "fragile" to me -- especcially if one sync is still running when it's time for the next to start.

In your research of cloud backup options did you find Zetta.net? The performance is well above the consumer online backup products I hear advertised on the radio, for example, and pricing is lower than other server backup solutions. The "incremental forever" backup means that your whole 2TB doesn't have to get repeatedly transfered, just the data that's changed since yesterday/the day before.

The point-in-time backup snapshots you get with Zetta could also be very useful to a design studio, if you ever have a need to go back to a previous version of a design.

Hi Rolf

I was reading your post with interest as I have the same dilema. I just wonder if the crashplan and offsite NAS option worked for you?

Thanks

Sami

We live in California about 50 miles south of San Jose and so our internet access is on par with a third world country, i.e. dialup at 49K, so backing up to a cloud is not an option. Instead we backup from one NAS to a second onsite NAS once a week and the rest of the time the second NAS is offsite. The odds of a fire destroying the NAS is very remote as is the likelihood of having two of its 4 drives fail at the same time. The odds of theft are even less likely than a fire. There is a probability of 1 in 10,000 of these two events occuring.

More likely is the electronics on the NAS box failing and needing to replace the motherboard if possible and the delay in obtaining the repairs. It is for this reason that a weekly backup is done to a second NAS box. Worst case we would lose 6 days of work.

We have information on our NAS that we do not want to share with the NSA and its millions of private contractors so the cloud is also too public for our needs. Weigh the odds of the diffrerent disaster scenarios and what would be lost and the cost to recover and then decide.

For direct NAS to NAS backup we have had the most success with the Qnap products.

Hi!

The thread is old, I know it, but I`ve just found an utility that might help you and other guys in backing up to NAS. Here is the software (Handy Backup), it seems they can do something in the area. Am I right?